Forced adoption in Australia: The women seeking justice

Young, unwed and vulnerable, an estimated 150,000 mothers were coerced into giving up their babies for adoption mid-last century. In 2013, they received a federal government apology. Now they want justice – and one is taking the fight all the way to the UN.

While the suffering of Australia’s stolen generations has been publicly acknowledged as part of the nation’s dark history, Arthur’s photo collection sheds light on another, less talked-about generation of children also taken from their parents – those that young, unmarried mothers were forced to give up for adoption, often via fraud and other illegal means, in the middle decades of the 20th century. In 2013, the then prime minister Julia Gillard made global history with a ­national apology to these mothers – and all victims of this practice. State governments, some churches and hospitals also apologised for their involvement.

Gillard committed the government to helping ­families affected by these practices. But adoption ­advocates argue that despite this year’s announcement from the Victorian government of $138 million in ­reparations to 3500 women whose babies were taken by the state, and some individual payouts given by ­various churches and charitable trusts, tens of ­thousands of other Australian victims have not yet seen a cent in recompense for their loss.

Lily Arthur’s son was one of an estimated 150,000 newborn Australian babies who were unwillingly ­surrendered for adoption between 1940 and the late 1980s. The traumatic experience later led her to run for local politics, inspiring her to campaign for justice for the victims of forced adoption. She is now the CEO of Origins Supporting People Separated by Adoption (Origins SPSA), an advocacy and support group formed in 1995. “Now, when I wonder, ‘Why me?’ ” she says of this work, “I think it’s because I was strong enough to fight back.”

Lily Arthur’s story is just one of 400 accounts of heartbreak and loss that now retired family court justice Nahum Mushin recorded between 2010 and 2012 as chair of the reference group reporting to the federal government’s 2012 parliamentary inquiry into historic forced adoption policies and practices. “I travelled around Australia four times, visiting every state and ­territory, interviewing the victims of forced adoption, including many unmarried mothers and girls who had been separated from their babies,” he tells Good Weekend.

A former nurse described a doctor at Vaucluse Private Hospital telling single mothers that their ­babies had died, while secretly exchanging them for the stillborn infants of married women and swapping their names on birth certificates. Another nurse at an unnamed private hospital recalled a doctor giving a ­single mother’s baby to one of his patients who’d had multiple stillbirths. “I imagine that was not an adoption … that was just a substitution,” she stated in her submission.

The inquiry highlighted other areas of medical ­malpractice, including unmarried women being ­routinely overdosed on barbiturates, anti­psychotics, potent pain­killers and sedatives, particularly during the adoption process, to make them more pliable. Another mother at Sydney’s Crown Street Hospital recalled asking the nurse during her agonising ­labour how long she had to go. She was told to “shut up and get on with it” and gave birth two hours later with blankets piled on her face. She was ­immediately injected with the lactation suppressant diethylstilboestrol (DES) and dosed with antipsychotics and barbiturates.

The inquiry heard reports of cases of unmarried mothers being administered DES in “exceedingly high doses”, sometimes three times higher than the recommended amount. Yet archived records revealed the health department had been warned in the late 1960s that the drug – a synthetic oestrogen – had been linked to fertility issues, breast and rare vaginal cancers when given during pregnancy. Introduced in the late 1930s to combat miscarriage, it was withdrawn as a miscarriage drug in 1971, but continued to be used to suppress lactation. In its findings, the inquiry determined that past forced adoption policies and practices had been “unethical, immoral and often illegal”.

Brisbane mother-of-four Linda Bryant is just one of the mothers who developed cervical cancer after the forced adoption of her baby. Bryant recalls that when she was diagnosed in 1981, 14 years after the Central Queensland birth, her doctors made no ­connection between the life-threatening condition and the drug she’d been given without her consent at 21.

“I’m assuming they didn’t know,” says Bryant, who began to suspect a link to the drug after Origins undertook nation­wide surveys to determine how many forced adoption victims had been ­diagnosed with breast and ­gynaecological cancers after receiving DES as a ­lactation suppressant. Of the 120 mothers surveyed in NSW alone, 80 per cent had those cancers.

Accessing government documents such as ­medical records, birth ­certificates and adoption ­consent forms continues to be a source of frustration and anger. “Records have been supposedly destroyed or lost, and those that do exist have had names omitted or deliberately mis­reported in an attempt to hide what they did to us,” Arthur says.

All this has contributed to what Sydney psychiatrist and adoption expert Dr Geoff Rickarby describes as “aggravated pathological grief”. While some were victims of rape, the majority were young mothers who’d become pregnant to first boyfriends ­because of their ignorance of sex and contraception. Yet a “false myth” about their sexuality – that they were promiscuous – had been used to take their babies away. Says Bryant: “I later discovered my baby had not been taken from me ­because I was unfit, but because there was a ­demand for girl babies for adoption in NSW in 1967.”

Source: Forced adoption in Australia: The women seeking justice